Martin Amis - Yellow Dog

Facing the U Hotel, at ten-fifteen the next morning, the sights of the sniper, moving, ranging, from face to face: this one, that one. The circular frame holding a rounded simulacrum, like a miniature kept in a locket — the faces of those that are loved and lost. In its crosshairs the face of a porter, the face of an arriving porno star, the face of Xan Meo, the face of the delivery-man with the potplant over his shoulder.

‘Sire, I crave a boon.’

‘Name it, plaything.’

But before all that he needed to be delivered to Dolorosa Drive, and he needed to climb out of the courtesy car, and enter the mansion (there was a different porno crew, from some earlier shift, coming the other way), and kiss Karla White, which proved difficult to do, with the telephonic mouthpiece round her neck like a chinguard … She wore a two-piece black business suit, which faintly sparkled as if with motes of coaldust, and black heels.

‘You’re fine,’ she said, in her warm, deep, accentless voice. ‘You don’t have to change. You’re fine. I was hoping you’d have lunch with me tomorrow at my house on the beach. I’ll send a car.’

‘So I don’t have to wear a crown or anything.’

‘You’re Rameses the Great,’ she said, ‘but you’re on a time-travel vacation from BC to LA. With some of your entourage. You’re fine … I apologise. Charisma Trixxx is keeping us waiting.’

‘They all do that,’ said the man in the white dressing-gown. ‘Ninety-nine point nine per cent out of a hundred of them do that. How come I don’t have one single line ?’

‘Xan, say hello to Dork Bogarde. You don’t have any lines, Dork, because you’re a mute.’

‘Ah. Hence why …’

To Xan she went on, ‘In narrative terms this is what’s known as a side-fuck. It gives the seventeen-year-old a breather.’ Karla’s head registered a slight jolt and she walked away with a hand raised to her earphone, saying, ‘Charisma? Charisma … Am I? … Now why’s that? …’

Xan walked around the room. Such a scene was not unfamiliar to him: the half-dozen technicians and handymen and general noisemakers, the girl with the clipboard, the coffee-urn, the pretzel-bowl. On a white sofa beneath a window sat a young black man of impressive, even heroic appearance: representatively heroic. He stood up and introduced himself as Burl Rhody: Karla’s bodyguard.

‘Charisma’s a noshow,’ she now said.

‘A first- timer no shows?’ said Dork. ‘What nextly? They noshow their fuck-tests?’

‘The girls are calling it a herpes sickout,’ said Karla, ‘but what it amounts to is a three-day strike.’

‘Charisma! Hello?’ said Dork loudly into the air. ‘There are other people on the planet, Charisma! Hello? Hello?’

‘Who can we get?’ asked the girl with the clipboard.

Karla said, ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll do it.’

For a moment Dork’s face was a mask of dental work. Then he assumed a solemn, almost liturgical expression, and rose to his feet, saying,

‘In all my many years I have served in the industry … never has it been bestowed upon me such an honour like this. A legend such as Karla White. I can assure you, dear lady, that I will master you with uh, with true sincerithy … and respecth.’

He shrugged off his robe and stood there … It wasn’t a bodybuilder’s pose, not quite. But the face was now nobly half averted; the right knee was bent inwards; the toes were flexed; the thumb and forefinger of each hand were joined in tight circles.

Matter-of-factly unbuttoning her jacket, Karla said, ‘I’m sorry, Dork. You’ll get your two-fifty or whatever it is and there’s a car outside.’ She turned on her heel. As she climbed the stairs she said, ‘Burl. Would you mind taking a quick shower?’

‘Sire, I crave a boon.’

‘Name it, plaything. But know that I could have you blinded for addressing me with your eyes, trinket, because I am as the Sun.’

‘True, O King … This youth who stands before you is not as other men are. He cannot speak and though his manly parts, as you see, are right and comely, he cannot spend. Do you understand me, Sire?’

‘Perfectly, fraction.’

‘So he must to the eunuchs. The milk of propagation is denied him.’

‘To the eunuchs he goes then, instrument. Him , pawn, no dynasty awaits.’

‘As the most skilled of all the whores in the slave harem, as the most schooled in all the nauseous arts, haply I can yet bring him to blossom.’

‘Do so, toy.’

‘Yet I have a further design, great sire.’

‘Speak it, bauble.’

‘As I serve this youth, so I would fain serve thee.’

‘Puppet, begin.’

Karla swung down not to her knees but her haunches, in a catsuit made of coins.

The next morning it was all over the Journal , pushed down the front page only by a further strike from the Sextown Sniper (a middle-aged porno star called Hick Johnsonson had been shot in the foot while reclining poolside at his home in Fulgencio Falls): ‘Reports Of Major Cockout On Dolorosa Drive’.

Xan sat in the hotel restaurant with the Journal propped up against his coffee-pot. Two tables away a young couple, damply agleam under a coating of man-tan, were acrimoniously negotiating a full-scale dinner (with two kinds of wine), watched by a camera and a klieg light. He read on:

It was at first believed that the surprise Cockout was the handiwork of Sir Dork Bogarde, who has claimed several Cockouts in recent years, and that the Cockout was sustained by Charisma Trixxx, a first-timer, and so theoretically vulnerable to Cockout.

But sources have revealed that the attractive newcomer was not present yesterday on Dolorosa Drive. ‘I think I got my wires crossed,’ explains Trixxx. ‘I was expecting the work but my agent said the shoot had been postponed.’ Trixxx denies all knowledge of the herpes sickout called by Comptroller Dimity Qwest of the LUWA (see page 2). Dork Bogarde was unavailable for comment.

It appears, however, that the artists involved were Burl Rhody, an industry jouneyman who quit the business some years ago, and legend Karla White, now of Karla White Productions. ‘I swear on my mother,’ said a crewmember who prefers not to be named, ‘it was classic Cockout. Beyond hot. He totally cocked her out.’

page 5 : Dolorosa Drive: A Community Comes To Terms With Cockout

Editorial: Suspicion Of Bullshit In Karla White Cockout

He had the chauffeur drop him off a short distance from the house. As he turned into the drive he saw that Burl Rhody (non-coincidentally, Xan would later decide) was halfway down it, at the wheel of a blue convertible. Burl pulled up.

‘She’s given me the day off. And the night.’

These words were spoken with apparently effortless neutrality. Xan noticed a copy of the Lovetown Journal on Burl’s passenger-seat.

Burl said, ‘It was Bullshit.’ He sank back for a moment.

Whether Burl was happier than usual Xan couldn’t tell. But now he smiled with torpid nonchalance and said,

‘You know what I was thinking, at the end? I thought, God I’m old. Porno … it’s not for lazy people. Dork Bogarde is a celebrated asshole, but in general they aren’t such a bad crowd. They look out for each other. Karla,’ he said, ‘Karla spends half her life on the girls’ rights and the health shit. That’s how fucked-up she is.’

Xan said, ‘He’s not here, is he? Andrews — Joseph Andrews.’

Burl didn’t answer, but his frown told Xan no. His rather too affronted frown — no, not here, not now, not yet. He slowly engaged first gear, an almost hectic act, it seemed, and said,